It’s that time of year again, time to look back at a year of new apps and highlight the ones we liked the most.

So we’d like some help from you, gorgeous Cult of Mac readers – who are all looking particularly good today, might I add? We need to draw up a shortlist of candidates, apps that made a splash on your home screens during the last 12 months.

Which ones delighted you? Which ones entertained you? Which ones left you giggling like a little kid? What about the free apps you wished you could pay for? Or the paid-for apps that you thought were ridiculously cheap? Which were the apps you rushed to tell your friends about, because you were so excited?

Help us out – post your thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Next week we’ll round up your suggestions, mix in a few of our own, and run a poll in which you can vote and decide the winner.

Headlining this week’s must-have iOS games roundup is an awesome new platformer called Mikey Shorts, which offers its own unique style of play focused on speed. We also have The Simpsons: Tapped Out, which makes its App Store debut for the second time; VOTE!!!, the latest title from Infinity Blade creators Chair Entertainment; and a great space-age building game from Gameloft.

Last week, we asked you to vote for your choice of the best iOS apps of 2011. Big thanks to everyone who contributed. Here are the results.
Let’s go through the list in detail; at the end, we’d like you to vote on the best app of the year, for inclusion in Cult of Mac’s annual Best of 2011 list. Let’s go!

In a pre-Christmas post, we asked Cult of Mac readers to vote for their favorite new Mac OS X app of 2010. As usual, by “new” we mean a brand new app, or a major update to an old app, that’s been released during the previous 12 months.

This years winner, by a considerable margin, was email client Postbox 2.

For those of you who’ve not tried it, Postbox is a feature-packed email client which combines some of the best ideas from web-based email and local email services. It’s an excellent tool for people who live and die by email, and who manage a large volume of messages across many different accounts.

Thanks to everyone who contributed their comments. I’m already looking forward to all the new treasures we might discover during 2011 – and the new means we will have to discover them, the Mac App Store, which should be live in just a few hours from now.